By default, the max number of new cards per day is 20, and I’ve messed around with the 20-60 per day range. Recently I’ve set it to 40 because it’s becoming very difficult to find 60 new words everyday that I don’t know, even when I’m reading pretty much all day.
Do you all do more or less than the default 20? And how many reviews do you do per day? These days I’m at like 800-1000 a day
I do sentence mining – making Anki flashcards from immersion material – via Yomichan, so my cards learned per day aren’t really consistent. I have a daily maximum of 75 cards per day but my average cards taken per day is 40, since I take all the cards I made that day. I use FSRS which slightly reduces my daily reps but the typical range is 400-470 repetitions, with a retention usually around 86%.
When I was seriously studying before LIFE happened, I was working through one chapter of 新完全マスター a week, however many words that was. I found that doing a huge chunk on Monday evening really paid off near the end of the week as easier words were naturally filtered out and near Friday/Saturday/Sunday I was only left with words I was struggling with and really needed to focus on.
When I was doing vocab seriously, 50 new words a day with good retention. Already had strong knowledge of kanji though, so that helped massively.
I’ve done Remembering the Kanji (2200 kanji recognition) and 5,000 of the most common vocabulary through anki (plus extra random vocab I pick up here and there). For everything I learn 50 at a time. Usually 50 per day until hitting about ~250 and then taking a few day break to make sure I retain what I’ve learned.
Review-wise it can be anywhere between 200-400 per day. As expected, the longer you go through the same reviews the faster they go, newer cards will take up more time.
What stops one from doing vocab seriously?
Not having enough new words for it to take up much time anymore 
. I still make lists of new words I see whenever I see them, but that’s maybe less than 50 a month. There is a bit of a spike here and there whenever I read things in a subject field I’ve never really read before of course.
I have the opposite problem. I feel like I bit off more than I could chew cramming for the N3, and now I constantly have a mountain of reviews to do. Slowly dwindling down the pile to a manageable amount before I add more words.
I am on a very meagre 8 a day. Could up it, but to be perfectly honest I’ve been enjoying a more relaxed pace of study after doing the N3 last December, and learning Japanese is a marathon not a sprint. Between Anki, Bunpro, and Wanikani I’m still spending a solid amount of time studying each day. I burnt out on Wanikani and stopped for a year which I really regretted once I came back to it so trying to avoid burning out again.
I’m about 5,000 words through the 10k core anki deck so know a pretty decent amount already. I’m also re-ordering words in the deck that I think will be useful to pull them to the front of the queue. This feels particularly useful now because being 5000 words deep I do come across some words in the deck which I’m not sure I’ll ever come across in the wild
How do you do a 1000 reviews a day and don’t burn out? Judging by my stats you must have at least 12k cards easily.
Currently my process looks like this. I use jpdb (to save time). I try to read something every day and add every non obvious word as a new card. By non obvious I mean a word that I did not guess the meaning and reading correctly on first try, or tricky words with awful rendaku traps or obscure kanji readings. For obvious words I either ignore them, or mark them as “never forget” to boost my ego.
I usually do reviews once or twice a day (jpdb gives you new cards with precision to the minute which has its merits and demerits). Currently with 3k cards in the learning I have around 200 cards to review a day.
Just until two weeks ago I was super hardcore about adding new cards to reviews because I had this goal that I would be alright-fluent next year, so each card I added as new card that day I would then add to reviews (start learning them), which was often up to 70 even, but after reading the book and then a VN I got humbled really bad with my goal and set a hard limit to 20 new cards a day, because there is no way I could keep up the pace for the years to come. As a result my new cards keep piling up faster than I can add them to learning phase, but it stopped bothering me as much as it did. I don’t think I will increase the amount ever, it’s more likely I will decrease it. In the end spending more time on reading and listening is more fun and effective.
tldr 20 new cards with around 200 reviews a day. This is how my pile looks at this moment:
I do like 100 new cards a day for now, and am going to increase it to 120 at some point. Want to lower that amount soon enough though as it can be stressful
NONE
i only add manually with piling up reps in mind. my conclusion after all those years is that anki has quickly diminishing returns compared to reading compelling content. i also test strictly for reading only - because thats the one thing that really must be brute force memorized.
anki is a support - not the main thing.
quoting tae kim (Review of Anki & SRS | Tae Kim's Blog):
I personally recommend the “firehose” method of dumping your brain with TONS of interesting content. This means plowing through pages of books and manga, hours of dialogue, and conversation practice forgetting more words than remembering them. Don’t sit around wasting time entering and reviewing what you’ve already seen, just get more, more, and MORE STUFF!!! You’ll be surprised at how much just seems to stick somehow like osmosis. Some people feel this is not effective because they end up forgetting so much stuff. They don’t realize that the fact that they even remember forgetting it means they’re learning it.
I’m right now around 30 cards per day, but easy ones. And it’s a lot for me. But i’m holding around 25 cards per day since 1 year now, so it’s really enough I think. I didn’t miss one day.
I think the most important is to don’t miss a day and try to immerse as much as possible once you reach a certain level where you can understand around 50-60% of a text at least. Less is really painful.
I review until I’ve seen 5 new cards in 15 minute intervals. With the remaining amount of that 15 minutes I read or do bunpro. Trying to do hundreds all at once leads to me getting distracting, so I have to break it up like this,
I use WaniKani, Bunpro, japanese.io, and four Anki decks. I review every day but I often go weeks without adding words.
Flashcards work best in service to immersion practice and output practice. When I’ve studied flashcards for the sake of flashcards, that information goes in one brain cell and out the other.
I’ve tried spamming myself with flashcards in the past. A little over a decade ago, I built an Anki deck with almost all the joyo kanji. But I forgot almost all of it because I wasn’t using it and because I wasn’t in the habit of looking at the construction of words/kanji or learning from my mistakes. So now I try to make immersion at least half of my practice. If you see a word in the wild and recognize it even once, you find it astronomically easier to remember.
I’m personally doing 10 to 25 Vocab cards a day (average 15), plus 10 kanjis. I don’t want to spend hours reviewing on Anki, so I just do some programming and some Anki here and there. When I have more time, I do half a lesson of Minna no nihongo per day 
If i have more free time, I will probably increase the amount of vocab to 25, but not go to the hundreds for sure ! If I skip a day (because I’m too concentrate programming all day), a huge amount of review is the best way for me to quit Anki 
